Red Light (15 page)

" 'Night,
Mom."

" 'Night, Mom.
Love to Timmy."

Merci trotted through
the rain to her Impala, checked the backseat with her penlight, swung open the
door and checked the backseat again. She sat rubbing her hands together and
flogged the pedal to get engine warm.

She took Irvine
Boulevard back to Tustin, back to her house in the orange grove. She slowed at
Myford and looked at the tract houses. Rain came down in sheets, flooded the
gutters, swamped up over sidewalks.

Myford and Fourth,
she thought: Patti Bailey with her heart blow out, dumped on the side of the
culvert. Back then it was nothing but groves. Now it's nothing but rain.

W
hite brilliance. Even her good sunglasses couldn't
beat the blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Merci felt the chains on
her tires crushing the road ice, felt the cold on her face through the windows.
Second gear and the big Chevy still wanted to slide.

She
hated snow, always had, but she couldn't believe how white it was, how
perfectly, flawlessly white. The drifts beside the road looked ten feet high.
Then the mountainsides—blankets of white, perforated by pines. And the trees
themselves, heavy with snow and stunned by sunshine, stood motionless, like
they were afraid to move.

Roy
Thornton's place was past the village, off a little road that dipped into
darkness then rose again into the world of purest optics.

When
she stepped inside she smelled coffee, bacon and burning wood. Thornton was
tall and heavy, plenty of gray hair, a shy smile. His eyes seemed small and a
little sad, shaded by diagonal folds of skin, but they twinkled when he looked
straight at her. He said to call him Roy. He introduced his wife, Sally, who
was making breakfast in front of a window looking out on Lake Arrowhead.

Thornton
got two cups of coffee and led Merci back to the den. Merci got the couch.
Thornton took a beat-up old lounger. Merci set the file on the coffee table in
front of him, got out her blue notebook and a pen. The windows had curtains
tied back for the view.

"How's Orange
County?"

"Crowded."

"Most
densely populated county in the state now."

"I
read that recently."

"Lots
to do."

"The murder
rate's dropped in half over the last two years. We can’t explain it, other than
lots of jobs and excellent police work."

Thornton smiled.
"It's nice to have citizens too busy making money to commit crimes. Still
lots of gang stuff?"

"Too
much."

"We
didn't have that when I was there. Hardly any."

Merci drank her
coffee, looked at the trout mounted on the wall. There was a TV in one corner,
one of the old RCAs with wooden and cabinet, cloth and wood stripping over the
speakers. On top was an arrangement of plastic greenery with a small nativity
scene the middle.

"Sally
and I went down for Tim's funeral."

"Yes."

"Good guy.
Worked hard. One of the few guys I knew who live his job but wasn't an asshole.
I liked him."

"I
did, too."

Thornton's small sad
eyes studied her, revealing nothing. Merci to fight herself to keep from
wondering what he knew, what he'd heard. The answer was: It didn't matter.

"Patti
Bailey," he said, leaning forward, picking up the file. He set it on his
lap and leafed through. "We never got a break. We did the groundwork,
interviewed family and friends, some of her customers----nothing. There were
some good angles. Drugs, bikers, her clientele. Maybe too many good angles.
Lots of motive in a crowd like that, she talked a lot. Seemed to be in the
middle of a thousand little intrigues. You know, biker mentality—who gets the speed
market this side of the Ortega Highway, who gets the other side. And every
grimy Hessian was trying to make every other grimy Hessian's girl. I remember
two or three guys thinking Patti was all his. Mexican heroin. Some pot. Mostly
speed and downers. She got herself into the transport side, made money.
Ambitious, you could say. Thought for herself. How well she thought is another
question."

"You get as far
as a decent suspect?"

"No. Couple of
the bikers made sense—the ones that thought she belonged to them. But we
couldn't make anything stick. We looked at a couple of johns, guys with ties to
Leary's Brotherhood down in Laguna, but nothing popped. Those guys didn't care
about her enough to kill her. They were loaded, free-love guys, plying her with
dope. She was one of hundreds. We got some shoe impressions out of the orange
grove near the body, but the soil was so loose they didn't help much. Estimated
a size nine, if I remember right. Guy took her clothes apparently. Nobody saw
anything. She'd been dead for a day before we got to her. Large caliber
handgun, likely."

Merci looked down at
her notes:
sus
—then a zero with a null slash through it.

"What
did your gut say, Roy?"

"Yeah, guts.
Well, two things. First of all, I don't think she was killed there. I think she
was moved. We couldn't prove that—no drag marks, no witnesses. Hard to say how
much blood soaked into the ground, or didn't. We dug in the right places but
couldn't find any lead. I think the body was moved. What's that tell you? Means
he killed somewhere incriminating, somewhere harder to clean up. But still
somewhere he could get the body out without being seen. A car, maybe."

"Did
she turn her tricks nearby?"

"She used a
couple of different motels up in Santa Ana. Her address was a hotel called the
De Anza, up Fourth Street. Old place, downstairs was a restaurant. There was
some prostitution going on there, but Bailey wasn't using it for business.
Mostly enlisted men from the Tustin air base or Pendleton. We didn't find much
in her room. That wasn't where he killed her."

"You
were thinking john then."

Thornton frowned and
shook his head. "Yeah, at first. But it was careful, too. What struck me
about the murder scene wasn't what we
got,
but what we didn't get—no
prints, no bullet lead or brass, no tire tracks we could work with. We got some
nice wide broom marks on the road shoulder. We could see where he'd kicked the
footprints when he left the grove. Pretty clean work, for such an ugly
homicide.

"Merci thought,
wrote: pains to cover tracks—calm and efficient. "Premeditated?" she
said.

"I still ask
myself that question. You take a hooker and a gunshot wound and you don't get
premeditated out of it, ninety-nine percent the time. But you factor in moving
the body, sweeping up most of the prints, you get another dimension. What I
thought at first was a pissed off john who didn't have the money, or couldn't
get it up, she wouldn’t do what he wanted. Then I thought it had to be one of
her biker Romeos, who thought she belonged to him. Then I wondered about the
drug connections. And still, I still think those aren't it. I think those
aren’t it because I worked them and got zip."

"Why'd
he take the clothes?"

"I
figured blood or semen. Nothing else made sense."

"Some
kind of predator then?"

Thornton shook his
head and leaned back. "No. Just guts again, to me it was too neat. And it
didn't match up with anything else we had. You figure if a guy's bent that way
he's going to do it again."

He was quiet then.
Merci looked at the snow outside, at pendants of ice hanging in the shade of
the northern eaves. She could sense Thornton wanted to say something. It was
the same silent notification that suspects gave under interrogations sometimes,
when you knew were about to lay it all on you.

"What?" she
asked quietly.

Thornton sighed.
"That was a tough year, sixty-nine. Sheriff Owen just up and resigned all
of a sudden. He said it was health reasons but he was healthy as a horse and we
all knew it. We had a supervisor—the big guy, Ralph Meeks—resign over a payola
scandal. Remember him? Most powerful guy in county politics, run out for taking
bribes. We had an old Mexican farmer—Jesse Acuna—beat half to death, claimed it
was racist cops trying to rid the county of minorities. Cesar Chavez, ACLU, got
in on that; and, of course, the press love story. Had a
New York Times
reporter here for that one. Did a whole series on what a rich, white, racist
county it was. And we had a bunch of deputies who were John Birchers, they were
going into neighborhoods and starting up volunteer police
departments—organizing right-wing groups to keep law and order in the land.
Some people said they were vigilantes, some said they were old-fashioned
patriots. Me, I think I'd go with the vigilantes. People liked to believe the
Birchers beat up that farmer, but I don't think anything was ever proved. Vietnam
just kept dragging on. The whole county was overflowing with dope—grass by the
ton up from Michoacan and Oaxaca, LSD pouring out of the Brotherhood in Laguna,
barbs and uppers plentiful and cheap. You know, high-school student body
presidents caught with kilo bricks in their lockers. And all the parents in
their flattops and bouffants, pissed off, voting hard-line Republican,
guzzling their Scotch. But their kids with hair to their butts, quoting Marx,
burning the flag, stoned on their dope. Everybody hated everybody else.
Everybody got a divorce. My own kid joined some no-good religious cult and went
to Guatemala for a year. We still hardly talk. Horrible time. The Black
Panthers and the Black Muslims. Everybody waiting for the next Watts. Every
week, the body count from the war getting higher. Nixon promising to win it.
Young men coming home in boxes by the hundreds, like the government was
sending them over so they could
get
killed, thin the opposition. Damned
Manson and his clan—that was the week right after Bailey. All the horrible
music. I felt like . . . well
...
we
had law, but no order."

Thornton stopped,
gazed out the window. Merci thought about that time, 1969, but didn't come up
with much because she had been four. She vaguely remembered lots of hair, peace
signs, psychedelia. Lots of heat coming off the TV screen: the war, Nixon and
his twenty-four hour five o'clock shadow, Kissinger and his bloodhound eyes.
She had loved
Mod Squad
and
Mission Impossible.
Didn't understand
most of Rowan and Martin, though her parents laughed all the way through it.
Merci remembered her mother wearing short skirts that showed off her legs,
Clark with his regulation flattop and thin ties. She remembered some political
meetings they went to—films on the Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia tragedies, the
Congo tragedy, the Cuba tragedy, communists inside the United Nations.

Sally Thornton
brought in two TV trays and popped them open. Merci's had a depiction of a Fourth
of July picnic on it, with flags and watermelon and a three-legged race going
on. The breakfast was huge and fattening, just the way Merci liked it. She'd
turn it to muscle in the gym.

"And
Patti Bailey?" she asked, when Sally was gone.

He looked at her and
shrugged. "Nobody cared. It didn't make much of a splash in the papers.
Sheriff Owen never pulled out the stops like he used to on big murders. No
reward organized, no extra dicks assigned. Just a routine case."

To her mind, Merci
had never had a routine case. She took each of them personally, which a cop
wasn't supposed to do. Not so much victims, more the perps. She took them very
personally. She wanted make sure they got a fair trial, then the needle, or
thrown in a dungeon forever. It was a bad quality to have and she knew it.
Hatred was a dirty fuel, but it was a fuel that burned hot and long.

Thornton sat forward.
"I like it up here. Clean air, fish in the lake. The country's different
now. Everybody out for himself, trying to make the most money. All the
commercials are guys and dolls in business suits. The questions are all
smaller. They don't matter as much. Whatever makes good TV. Lots of law. Lots
of order."

Merci thought about
this. "Tuesday night a woman got murdered. I'm going to find the creep who
did it. To me, the questions that matter are still the same. That's why I do
what I do."

Thornton smiled.
Merci saw nothing condescending or humoring in it.

"That's right.
Now you got this Whittaker woman. I hope doesn't turn into your Patti Bailey.
Hope you're not sitting on porch someday, fat and retired like me, and some
sharp young cops wants to know why you didn't solve it."

"No
offense was meant here, Roy."

"Offense? I hope
you find out the truth, young lady. I hope you kickass and take names. I'd be
offended if you didn't."

"I will."

"Look. I made a
call. Bailey was tight with a sister and we kept touch. She had some
interesting things to say, most of it too late to us. She'll talk to you. She's
down the mountain, in Riverside. Here.” Thornton slipped a sheet of paper into
the file, handed it back to her.

"The phone's in
the kitchen."

• • •

Merci followed a CHP
escort back down the mountain, first or second gear most of the way, through
the ferocious brightness of late morning. She had coffee at a truck stop, read
the papers, watched the big rigs rumble in and out, checked through her blue
notebook.